Mobile Deep Linking: 4 reasons why you need it & how you can do it

The demand for content at one’s fingertips has increased exponentially as mobile becomes the primary screen for users. What if you could make your user’s mobile experience much faster, seamless and convenient? And simultaneously achieve higher conversion rate for your mobile marketing efforts. Deep Linking provides exactly this. While you might have heard of deep linking, very few know the advantages that you can reap from it.

Firstly, what is the challenge we face…

Today mobile apps and mobile sites operate in a silo. As a user, you don’t want to click a link while checking email on your mobile device only to land on the mobile site of the content, especially when you have the app already installed on your device. This shift to the browser, disrupts the seamless experience a user desires and also reduces the engagement ratio. Similarly, when the user clicks on an ad from a e-commerce brand for a particular product within another app, he ideally should be taken to the e-commerce app itself if he has the app installed.

The Solution: Deep Linking

With deep linking, the user can open the desired app content directly from the link. This removes the silo and makes the content immediately accessible for the user. This helps you reach potential customers through a variety of mobile platforms whilst making the mobile internet experience much faster and convenient.

Why do you need Deep Linking?

We have listed 4 key reasons why you require Deep Linking -

Less Disruptive Experience for the user - Creates an enhanced experience when a user engages with a link, keeping the flow of navigation as the user would desire

Makes your App more Discoverable – As Google indexes deep links within apps now, more content can be found from user queries with the search engine

Allows Re-Engagement – Even though the user has the app installed, he needs to see the value post install. Deep linking allows continuous re-engagement with the product or service within the app

Higher ROI from Mobile Advertising with Re-Targeting – Advertisers get more ROI from mobile advertising since ads can now be more aligned and users can be taken to the relevant content directly. Users are driven to the right purchase funnel eliminating the various navigation stages, hence resulting in more conversions. By using a deep link for the destination of your promotions across email, social, third parties and your website, you can maximize your cross channel marketing efforts

How you can enable it

You can get your App ready for Deep Linking by either directly registering your URI and Scheme directly within the App or by using a 3rd party library like mobiledeeplinking.org

Direct Integration

If you are building an iOS app you can find detailed instructions here under the Advance App Tips and Tricks

If you are building an Android App you can find the complete instructions here

In both the cases you need to first register your URI & Scheme and then define the handler which will be called when the specified URL is called

Integrating with a 3rd Party Provider

On the other hand you can also use the opensource library provided by mobiledeeplinking.org which works for the both iOS and Android and provides a unified solution.